“So you want to come along.”

“Nothing would give me more pleasure,” he said. “To see this through.”

To see this through. Rachel wondered what that meant. “I don’t think we’d have gotten this far without you,” she said, with total sincerity. “So stay as long as you want, as long as you know—”

“That it could be risky? I understand.” He gestured toward the left-side windows. “The riskiest maneuver is almost upon us, in fact.”

They faced so many unknowns. The first hour after taking off from Guam, she and Pav, Zeds, and Xavier had huddled in the rear of the plane, going over their options.

Pav told them that Chang had arranged for them to land in northern Mexico, near the city of Rosarito. “That country is filled with secret landing strips from the drug days, but few are equipped to handle a jet.” He had smiled. “Nevertheless, we have found one.”

They would then drive overland to the coast, where they would board a small sub. “This definitely sounds like a smuggling craft,” Xavier had said.

“No question. There’s barely room for all of us.”

“Do we have to smuggle drugs, too?” Zeds said.

For a moment none of them realized that the Sentry was joking. “No,” Rachel said, laughing, “only our own cargo.”

They would be put ashore somewhere on the California coast between Santa Barbara and San Diego, final destination to be decided en route. “The Free Nation Federales keep changing their countermeasures,” Chang said, “so our sub captain will be doing the same.”

“So this does still occur,” Rachel said. “Drug smuggling.”

“Oh my, yes,” Chang said. “No government in human history ever stopped it, and even with all their extraterrestrial powers, the Aggregates haven’t, either.” He smiled. “In many cases, however, the smuggling has gone the other way . . . it used to be people into the U.S. from Mexico. For the past two decades, it’s been the other way.”

“Speaking of cargo, Chang,” Xavier said, standing and indicating several containers. “Your little team of mice will be busy arranging the next leg of our journey. But before we make a move, I need four hours to produce our pharmaceutical package.”

“Our what?” Pav said.

“The poison pill,” Rachel said.

“Oh.” In spite of his claims of having slept well, Pav was still, to Rachel’s eyes, a bit slow and unfocused . . . or he would have remembered a key backup portion of their strategy versus the Aggregates, which was to replicate the only strategy that had actually worked against the machinelike aliens: infect them with a fast-evolving, self-replicating poison that destroyed their ability to communicate and reproduce.

It had worked to cleanse Keanu of the Reiver infection twenty years ago, driving the survivors off the NEO and toward Earth.

No one expected success from the same formula, but Jaidev, Sanjay, and other great HB minds had discovered a way to mask a deadly bioweapon as something entirely different—a Substance K–derived battery that stored vast amounts of energy in a very small package. It had been the end product of years of research, since the HBs could use such a device . . . and the subject of an increasingly tedious series of jokes, as the HB researchers pondered the eternal question, “What do Reivers want?”

The cleverest aspect of the backup plan was the presence of an actual poison pill weapon much like the original 2019 version. “It works two ways,” Sanjay had said. “Either the Reivers spot and grab it, missing the real weapon . . . or they don’t see it and it kills them.”

All this supposed that Rachel, Pav, and company were captives, or worse, dead. So it was not an option Rachel had spent much time pondering.

Nevertheless, Xavier needed time to complete “assembly” of both packages. “Obviously we won’t move until you’re ready,” Chang told him.

“Just as obviously,” Rachel said, “the sooner we are ready to move on this Reiver ray gun, the better.”

“I leave those maneuvers to you,” Chang said. “I will remain in Mexico to complete my work, then—”

“Then what?” Pav said, an edge in his voice. “Run back to China in case we fail? Make sure you’re out of the blast radius?”

Chang blinked. When he spoke, he sounded tired. “I’m sorry if you feel I’m abandoning you, but I’m a journalist and a rather famous one at that. My absence from China has already been noted. My association with you is public. If someone sees me here—”

“They’ll know we’re here, too,” Rachel said. “You’re right, Edgar. You’ve worked wonders getting us this far. From this point on, the smaller our team, the greater our chance of surprise.” Rachel saw that Colin Edgely was looking away, as if trying to pretend he hadn’t increased the size of her team by twenty percent.

Rachel turned to Xavier. “The burden of this falls to you and me.” Both still had friends and even family in Free Nation U.S., most in the western half of the country. They would use their time in Mexico to make contact, and hopefully find one who would shelter them as they prepared for an assault on this Aggregate weapons facility.

Zeds’s comment was, “I am troubled that we have the potential to be detected and detained at almost any point.”

“So it’s a good thing that’s the whole idea, right?” Xavier said.

Jo Zhang, their co-pilot, emerged at that point, a broad smile on her face. “We’re right on track and on schedule.” She was, Rachel judged, in her midthirties—her own age—but seemed to possess a rangy confidence that Rachel lacked, much like Tea; maybe you had to be that kind of person to operate high-tech flying machines. Or maybe operating them made you confident.

“What about defenses?” Rachel asked. “If we ran into Free Nation forces off India, I would expect a lot more right off California.”

“We have access to, ah, certain information about Free Nation vessels. There are bases to the north and especially to the south, at San Diego. We’re pretty sure we’re tracking them all, and there are no threats at the moment.”

“How about aircraft and missiles?”

Jo shrugged, looking, for a moment, quite fatalistic. “They’re more difficult to track, especially since there’s no international air traffic control data here. And with missiles, well, they can be on the ground one minute, and in your tailpipe the next. But we see no unusual air activity at the moment, and if we do, our decoy makes a run for it and draws them off.”

We hope, Rachel thought, as Jo slipped away, into the lav.

Before leaving Guam, Rachel had insisted on thanking the pilots, not just Jo and Steve, who had skillfully flown them from Bangalore to Darwin to Guam, but the two who were to fly that decoy plane.

The decoy pilots turned out to be two grim ex-military jet jockeys, one of them originally from the U.S. His name was Benvides, and he was twenty years older than Rachel. “I remember your father,” he said. “I was just out of flight school when the Keanu mission happened. And the Objects hitting. That must have been . . . awesomely weird.”

“Let’s just say I was unprepared for it.”

Benvides laughed. It turned out that he and his family had been stationed in Japan when the Reiver Aggregate invasion occurred. “We wanted to go home, to join the fighting, if nothing else. But we couldn’t. There was no real war . . . it was like a total collapse within a few weeks.”

“Taj said it was like trying to climb a tree that had rotted from within.”

“If you realize that the rot happened overnight due to outside forces, yes. Anyway, I’ve been waiting twenty years to poke a stick in the Aggregates’ eyes, assuming they have eyes.”

The other man was a younger Aussie named Quentin. He told Pav he came from a family of bush pilots. “Hoping to get back to that after this,” he said.